11 Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress
WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform and it can also be used as a CMS to power other types of websites, such as a portfolio site. However, with some creativity and a growing number of available resources, WordPress’s limits seem to be expanding constantly.
In this article we’ll take a look at a combination of tutorials, plugins and themes that can help you to use WordPress in non-traditional ways. Hopefully you’ll find something that you can use, or at least something that will be a valuable learning resource for extending your knowledge and skills of working with WordPress.
1. Membership Directory
Last year Chris Cagle wrote a tutorial, How to Use WordPress as Membership Directory, at WPDesigner. Chris uses WordPress to power his directory, Pittsburgh Designers. The tutorial uses a few plugins for users and role management, and the end result is a moderated directory that allows members to enter information about themselves.
Update: Chris has posted a follow up to this tutorial since the release of WP 2.7 – The New and Improved Way to Turn WordPress 2.7 into a Membership Community.
2. Business Directory
The Business Directory Plugin for WordPress accomplishes a similar end result as the tutorial above. The plugin will allow you to create a directory on your website or blog where users can submit information about themselves or their business.
3. Ffffound Clone
Assualt Blog has an interesting tutorial where Tim shows how he built a Ffffound clone on WordPress. Ffffound is a great site for inspiration, and a sort of image bookmarking service for those who have access. Tim shows that WordPress can be used to build your own personal version, and he even has a working finished product, VNovember, that you can check out. The tutorial shows you how to set up the theme that Tim developed, which plugins to install, and how to make it all work.
4. Job Board
Niche job boards are now pretty common, especially in the design and development industry. The design job board here on DesignM.ag is using a great premium WordPress plugin called WPJobAds to power the job board. You could, of course, build this type of functionality into WordPress manually if you had the time and desire, but WPJobAds makes the process easier.
RecruitPress is a fee job board option. It is not a plugin, but rather a group of plugins and some core file modification that you install on top of WordPress.
I highly recommend that you do NOT buy the JobPress premium WordPress theme. I bought it, it didn’t work out of the box, and I got no response to my emails for support. The owners seemed to disappear as their site went down for an extended period, but it looks like it’s back now.
BlueFur also has a job board script that can be downloaded and used for your own job board. It’s more labor intensive than WPJobAds, but it is free.
5. Techmeme News Clone
Raj Dash wrote an article for Performancing that covers the process of using WordPress to build a “Techmeme River of News Clone.” This approach will not allow you to duplicate exactly what Techmeme does, but it is a cool idea that could be used in a variety of different scenarios.
In the article, Raj refers to a tutorial on Devlounge for mashing up feeds with Yahoo! Pipes. This is what Raj uses to create the river of news (a stream of headlines from a selection of blogs).
6. Email Newsletter
One of the older articles on NETTUTS is Build a ‘WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager Using WordPress and FeedBurner. WordPress and FeedBurner are obviously used together by thousands of bloggers, but in this tutorial you’ll learn how to create an email-only newsletter with content that does not show up on the front page of the blog. The tutorial shows the manual process for “hiding” the newsletter category on the blog, but you could also achieve the same thing with the Advanced Category Excluder plugin if you don’t want to deal with the code.
7. Forums
While there are a number of options for hosting a forum on your site, it’s also possible to use WordPress. TheDeadOne.net offers the TDO Forum WordPress Theme. The theme will give you forum functionality, although you’ll most likely want to customize the design in some way. (Note: It only claims to be tested through WordPress 2.5).
8. Contact Manager
It’s also possible to use WordPress as your own contact manager. The WP Contact Manager Theme was developed for this purpose. It is a free theme that makes the blog a functional contact manager that can be extended further with some free plugins.
WP-CRM is another theme for turning WordPress into a contact manager. With WP-CRM you can add contacts and notes from the front end of WordPress without being in the admin dashboard.
9. Wiki
WordPress Wiki is a premium theme ($30) available at ThemeForest. This theme makes it easy to use WordPress for your own wiki. As expected, it’s not as robust as some other options, but it’s a great way to add a simple wiki to an existing site without a lot of effort or cost.
10. Review Site
WP Review Site is a premium plugin ($97) that will turn WordPress into a review site where visitors can place their own reviews and rate the listings. It also comes with a WordPress theme and some affiliate marketing tools. WP Review Site can be used as part of another site, or it can be used to set up a site dedicated to reviews.
11. E-Commerce
WP e-Commerce is a surprisingly powerful free plugin that will allow you to sell items through your WordPress-powered site or blog. While WordPress is not intended to compete with platforms that have been developed specifically for e-commerce, this plugin is ideal for bloggers and website owners who want to set up a small store without a lot of effort or expense.
Update:
Readers have suggested some additions to this list:
- Geo-Blogging
- Just Tell Me Why
- Pressmark (Delicious clone)
For more WordPress-related content, please see:
114 Responses from Readers
What an excellent and unique article! WordPress has grown out of a “blogging platform” to a full publishing platform. I like using WordPress if I can help it – especially if I don’t need the super-flexibility and customization of content types that Drupal has; I find that people generally find the administration section of WordPress more user-friendly than Drupal.
Thanks Jacob. Yeah, I think the WordPress community of users keeps taking it further with specialty themes and plugins too. In my opinion the guys behind WordPress have also done a pretty good job of being flexible and working to make it more useful in ways that are suggested by users.
This is really a timely post for me. A client of mine had the Membership Directory plugin enhanced so he could add in more fields of data, which will make for a pretty nice directory when it is done.
Also, I have been looking for some kind of script/app to display the funny pics I come across and bombard my friend’s in-boxes and IM windows. The Ffffound Clone seems like it will do the trick, especially if I can post via FireFox with ScribeFire.
Jason,
Glad to hear it can help!
Great article Steven. I’m building a real estate site for a client now, using WordPress. It’s going to be great for non technical clients to use WP to publish house listings, and have their clients subscribe to their news letters and feeds.
What great information!! I swear by WP and am directing all my SM clients towards it. I seriously didn’t realise that there was so more more to it. Zooommm off I go to blog, Tweet and shout this out!!
One thing though…. I’m still trying to figure out Adsense in WP though – it is for premium sites or the standard free WP blog? Can you help pls? Within a pack I purchased there were adsense ready WP themes which I don’t have a clue how to use with the standard blog. :-S
How about using it as a fully fledged Geo-Blogging platform…?
http://wpmupremium.com/blog/2009/02/17/introducing-wpmu-gmaps/
It’s not quite ready for public consumption yet, but it does at least give you another idea about what can be done with Wordpress…
This post really shows how versatile Wordpress really is. WP really helped me a lot so far.
Can they be combined on a single installation? I notice Pittsburgh Designers is running an external job board – could that be an internal WP job board?
Similarly, I can’t find any examples of the Business Directory plugin being used on a site that’s not *entirely* a directory.
It seems to me the combination should be possible but I haven’t really checked. Got any good examples of people combining these things?
This is very helpful. Having all these resources in one place is handy.
I have used 4 of them already in the past and currently looking into using a 5th on a project now.
On the current project I considered using the WP-Commerce (http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/) plugin and eventually decided to use the Shopp (http://shopplugin.net/) plugin instead. Both will work for turning Wordpress into a shopping cart or e-commerce system.
It’s fair to say the plugin offered in this article is still a very useful plugin and when configured correctly it works well and the shopping carts look nice. However I found the Shopp plugin much easier to administrate on the back end or admin side of things.
The only real difference I could see between them both was very minor. This issue was the ability to upload one image for a product and have that image re-used and re-sized for you rather than the need to upload an image for both the thumb and large versions independently. The Shopp plugin does this for you. The WP-Commerce plugin forces you to have multiple versions of each image size.
This is a huge factor when the client adding products is not familiar with re-sizing multiple images.
In saying that I need to say that for digital downloads such as music, images, presentations and artwork sales the WP-Commerce site is a much better solution.
These are products that will be downloaded once a payment is received. The WP-Commerce plugin not only handles this very well but is also available for free in their limited or trail version of the plugin. In order to take full advantage of the Shopp plugin you really must pay for a pro version of the plugin for $55.
Great article none-the-less.
I never even imaged that WP could be used in these ways. Thanks for sharing.
This is perhaps a bit basic for your readers, but twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve found myself recommending to clients that they use Wordpress to create static websites. It’s so straightforward to set up, customise and generate RSS feeds for news items.
Donnette,
There are a lot of different ways to use AdSense with a WP blog/site. You could add the code manually to the theme files, or many themes have AdSense integration where you can control things from the dashboard. There are also lots of plugins for AdSense and ad management. I don’t have one to recommend over any others, but if you do a Google search you’ll find a lot of options.
Hayley,
In some cases yes, and in others no. I’m not sure if their are directories that are being used by sites that aren’t strictly directories. To give you an idea, on this site I have the blog, gallery, news and job board all on one installation of WordPress.
You forgot Alex Girard’s outstanding hack of WordPress to turn it into a social news/bookmarking site.
It’s called PressMark: http://bookmark.alexgirard.com/tag/pressmark/
nda
WordPress is so flexible that its huge community can develop any tool with this CMS.
The number 12th Non Traditional Use for WordPress:
http://justtellmewhy.com/
Pressmark is a delicious clone made with wordpress:
http://github.com/alx/pressmark
Example:
http://bookmark.alexgirard.com/
Thanks for the top spot!! I recently published a new 2.7 version of my WP Membership directory here: http://www.cagintranet.com/archive/the-new-improved-way-to-turn-wordpress-27-into-a-membership-communit/
I also re-posted my original article here because of the way WPDesigner went downhill and I needed a way to easily respond to questions.
very nice! I didn’t realize wordpress was so versatile. I primarily work with Joomla, using wordpress strictly for blogging. I particularly like to see more e-commerce support for wordpress.
I also use Wordpress as a Press Release submiter (http://www.MisterPress.com) !
Wordpress is so awesome…..
Really neat article.
But please don’t promote plugins or themes that violate WordPress’ GPL license:
http://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/
Really helpful post for WordPress fans! Thanks!
Good to know Steven, thanks.
Great article. I have learned a lot and am going to be trying some of these concepts.
I’ve use wordpress as an Infoscreen (for public announcements)! Loads a new post every 20 sec. Is about to be implementet on all the schools in our community. Innstalled via templatede only (soon to be found in the template directory on wordpress.org.
Sorry – the demo is in norwegian…
Very cool article. I’ve been looking into word press recently for some ideas I have…can’t wait to get started. Thanks for posting.
WordPress: the Business Directory:
Praized turns WordPress into a vehicle for providing any website with ‘local search in a box’ and features a directory of over 17 million local business listings with social tools (like a Digg for places). As an example, The Cambridge Voice (http://cambridgevoice.ca/business-directory ) has integrated Praized into their local online newspaper and use the Praized Wordpress plug in to power their business directory. Not only can people refer to the pre-populated listings but they are able to vote, tag and comment on all places that are relevant to its readers.
Great to see what you can do with wordpress. I built a site in Joomla! thinking WP would not be able to handle my needs. I was wrong and just finished re-building in WP. love it.
I´d include another project, not quite a template or a plugin but worth to know if you want to create a social media website:
http://buddypress.org/ (social media)
Thanks for the link love on my vnovember ffffound style blog. I still use it on a regular basis as a source of inspiration and I highly recommend it to everyone who can’t get a ffffound invite!
Wow, pretty excellent information, thanks. Was wondering recently how I could use WP to do more than brochure sites.
Not sure why you’d want to use WP for your wiki or forum, since there are some good free and OS options out there designed specifically for those purposes. Otherwise, there are some great ideas on here.
Rick,
I agree that it’s not the ideal choice for wiki’s and forums. The situation where I would consider using WP for this purpose would be for a small add on to a site, not a wiki or forum that was expected to draw a lot of traffic and need a lot of features. Some developers would rather use WordPress for a site with this purpose than try to learn something new if they doubt they’ll use it again.
From a web dev standpoint, all the WP hype is annoying… especially using it in non-traditional blogging standpoints. Mostly I’m not a WP fan because it’s overly annoying to customise when there are far better CMS out there that allow for much better design implementation, accessibility, and … well… anything else. I understand it’s easier to use, but when you start deviating from it’s primary objective the point is lost completely on me.
Far more robust applications could be built in the time spent trying to make your base application work in WP, not to mention you don’t have to work with the weirdness that is the theming. I may just be slightly bitter since I convert designs to a modified WP with a custom plugin that really sucks and makes my job ever so annoying.
I guess my point is that if you need an app that is a blog and you know nothing web-related, go with WP; if you need an app that is not a blog, do not use WP. Props to everyone who slagged through it to be innovative with WP but, honestly, the time could have been better spent making a robust app that’s built for itself.
Not to mention that PHP is quickly becoming deprecated.
Great post! I would love to see more development happening with forums and shopping carts for Wordpress
OneNews Theme = Alltop/Popurls clone
How about Scriblio, a library catalogue?
http://about.scriblio.net/
Great post, been looking for the job board one for ages!
Thanks
Cannot believe that’s really WordPress behind those sites.
Thank you for the great article, it is going to keep me busy for awhile.
Paul
I never knew that wordpress could be used for so much.
Danielle
I’ve just transferred to WP and I’m so delighted that I did. Thanks for posting these plugins. Great read and reference for a WP newbie like me.
Nice examples !
Nice post!. I host CV’s on WP-MU. (actually, just one yet). In this time of crisis it’s pretty handy!. Have a look here: http://cvvanmij.nl/wkossen for my CV (dutch)
This allows you to manage parts of the CV easily using the familiar and easy to use Wordpress Backend. Please comment on the blog http://cvvanmij.nl
Willem
It’s pretty clever what you can do with these WordPress Plugins. Though sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch and you’d be better off using a dedicated product.
Definitely for forums, etc, but perhaps also for job boards. I’d rather use something like Easy Job Boards.
Hey there’s one more! Fresh Apps, iPhone apps directory, sorta like Digg http://www.freshapps.com/
An additional application that I’ve seen Wordpress used for is a corporate intranet. I haven’t seen a whole lot of talk about it though.
@designm; Thanks for listing the WP e-Commerce Plugin!!!
@christian gehrke; You can upload multiple images with the WP e-Commerce Plugin. You don’t need to upload thumbnail images and large product images. That would be strange… can you email me to discuss what you mean. Maybe I don’t fully understand what you are saying
The WP e-Commerce Plugin 3.6.10 is about to get overhauled by 3.7 which has a friendly interface, a template engine and much much more. It generally kicks ass.
@designm & the world; We’ve also launched a Wiki Plugin (wp-wiki.org) which compliments the Wiki Theme. It turns WordPress into a more powerful Wiki system
Opps. I should have linked that WP Wiki Plugin. Done now
Hey nice post. I’ll be trying to use wordpress for a little social network in a couple of months… (no, not like buddypress)
Excellent article. I’ve had a couple of ideas for new sites on the backburner. I think I can use one of these solutions to help bring an idea to life so thanks for sharing.
Great article! I’ve been thinking of new ways to use Wordpress. I’m probably going to try and develop a sheet music download site using it. I’ll definitely follow the e-commerce information, my sister was working on a site for the store she owns. This would be great
Excellent post! Very informative. Thank you!
I wanted to add another important use of WordPress to your list: Using WordPress to power small business websites (even when no blog is involved).
The majority of the U.S. economy, and to varying degrees around the world, is powered by Small Business.
Unfortunately, when it comes to websites and CMS, the typical small companies using leading edge technology like WordPress or content management systems tend to be tech types who understand the myriad benefits of a CMS over a web 1.0 website.
A growing number of companies like mine that perform Internet Marketing and website design for small business are building all of our traditional small business websites on WordPress, even if the site has nothing to do with blogging or have a blog.
The list of advantages to small business are quite long but the biggies include WordPress’ built in seo-goodness, dirt-cheap web hosting, extensibility, and the ability for the small business owner to make their own simple text/photo changes via the WordPress visual editor (rather than paying me or another web developer every time).
Also key is the blogging functionality of WordPress. It’s a natural area of a small business to post content like Specials and other things that while not directly a blog, function like a blog. Ask a small business owner if they want to blog and they’ll think you’ve gone mad – show them how to use a blog to publish their restaurant’s nightly specials without paying for web dev services and they’ll give you a big hug.
Cheers!
- Julian
Julian,
I completely agree with you. To me, though, this is more of a common use for WordPress now, that’s why I didn’t go into it in this article.
Hi Steven,
I forgot to say on my last comment that I am very happy to have found your website through Boag World. This is a great design community site.
Back to the topic:
In our world you’re absolutely right. Unfortunately, only 60% of small businesses in the U.S. have any kind of website at all. Of those that do, only a very small portion use any kind of CMS. When they do have a CMS it’s often a big company offering that’s been dummied down to meet the needs of technophobic business owners.
Anyway, I hope that communities like DESIGNM.AG can keep spreading the good word!
Now back to work for me.
Cheers
Thanks for the comment Julian. Yes, I think WordPress is a great CMS option for small businesses. I’ve been using more on client sites for that purpose rather than just blogs.
Hey thanks nice post. yYou gave me some ideas.
We are looking at publishing around 10 newsletters, each with different content in 5 different languages. Can a single instance of wordpress handle this?
nice, really nice!
anyone who managed to get the WP-CRM to work with wordpress 2.7.1 and all the plugins? I did not get 2 plugins to work and without those 2 the CRM does not work.
any help would be appreciated as im not a wp-guru.
Wordpress rocks
Thanks for the tips regarding blogging, it was very helpful.
Never imagined WP could be used in so many ways… great article…
hello webmaster,you should let us know where to download this wp themes.
They are not all using themes that are available to the public. Any that are free themes or premium themes are linked.
The geo-blogging theme (gMaps) is available for purchase at the following address – http://wpmupremium.com/blog/2009/05/04/wpmu-gmaps/
Wow!! Never thought that there were so many applications for wordpress. Especially creating your own contact management system. Loads of food for thought, thanks guys
This is really a brilliant post, wordpress plugins really extend the capabilities to the limits. I picked up a wordpress review plugin from http://www.wordpressreviewplugin.info/ and it has ton’s of features with the CSV uploads feature.
Also can some one help me to build a directory site with wordpress or is there some plugin available ?
Fantastic post! It shows the versatility of wordpress and the way it is used by so many people! Thank you guys!
This is a great site and I’m glad I found it. Very nice and useful article.
Thanks
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